The Relationship Between Musical Structure and Emotion in Classical Piano Scores : A Case Study on the Theme of La Folia

We explored the relationship between musical structure and emotion on different variations of La Folia – a musical theme of Portuguese origin based on a standard harmonic progression. Our approach aims to extend previous research by investigating more factors and comparing different models for music emotion. In a pilot study, 12 participants rated the emotion associated to the stimuli on a graduate scale from 1 to 10, according to 3 different models for music emotion: the valence/arousal-based emotion model (Russell, 1980), a discrete emotion approach (Izard, 1972), and the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS) (Zentner et al., 2008). Stimuli were commercial recordings of the first 8 bars of …